Evangelical Catholicism and It's Not The Veil That Makes The Nun

I recently saw an article on YAHOO entitled “What’s It Like To Be A Thirty-Something Nun” (http://waysify.com/a/225086/what-its-like-to-be-a-30-something-nun)

Here is the opening paragraph:

Sara Marks is a 31-year-old nun. But, put away all your preconceived notions of how a sister should be — she'll defy all of them. Marks wears mascara and Calvin Klein dresses. She loves the Back to the Future trilogy and watches reality TV. She couldn’t live without a hair straightener. She loves to dance and wander around Manhattan ducking into adorable coffee shops. She travels and goes to the beach. She’s a photographer. She writes music and plays the guitar. She’s funny and warm and loves her life.

I wish I could say that the interview gets better from there, but it really doesn’t.  It’s not bad, mind you, it’s just—well—superficial.  About the best is

"We are normal people leading normal lives who happen to be committed to living simply, promoting social justice, and speaking out for those who are poor and marginalized. We are centered on God and faith, and we do pray, but we also sit down and watch television and go to the movies, just like anyone else."

This is good—but you know this is something that should be able to be said about every baptized Christian.  You don’t need to be a nun or a monk or even a priest to promote social justice or to speak out for those who are poor and marginalized.  Same about this quote about the vow of obedience:

It is really obedience to God’s word, to really listening to the other sisters, your friends and your family to learn what God is calling you to do. That is all fluffy and wonderful and sounds great on paper, but living that is hard. It is a balance.

I am not writing to denigrate what Sister Sara aspires to be—to the contrary, I only want her and others like her to aspire to be more.  but first let me defend her against some of the katholik krazies that write things like

Sorry to inform the readers, but these women aren't Catholic nuns. The Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia is a New-Age cult that has nothing to do with Catholicism or Christianity. They worship an entity they call the "Cosmic Christ" which is NOT the Jesus of the New Testament. This article gives no information to the person who would truly like to know what the life of a Catholic nun is like.

Sister Sara’s community, the Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia, are a recognized community of Religious women in the Catholic Church.  The are part of the Sisters of Saint Francis of the Neumann Communities, a federation of Franciscan communities founded by Saint John Neumann, Bishop of Philadelphia, in the nineteenth century.  They are recognized as Catholic Religious by the Holy See.  Furthermore, all Christians  who hold to Christian orthodoxy worship the “Cosmic Christ” who is no other than He Who is described in Colossians 1:15-20.  

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For in him were created all things in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things he himself might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness^* was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile all things for him, making peace by the blood of his cross [through him], whether those on earth or those in heaven.

Now I want to put all this in the context of the theme we have been touching on occasionally which is a response to George Weigel’s book, Evangelical Catholicism: Deep Reform in the 21^st Century Church.  Weigel’s Thesis, with which I could not agree more, is

The Catholic Church is being invited to meet the Risen Lord in the Scriptures, the Sacraments, and Prayer and to make friendship with him the center of Catholic life. Every Catholic has received this invitation in Baptism, the invitation to accept the Great Commission, to act as evangelists and to measure the truth of Catholic life by the way in which Catholics give expression to the human decency and solidarity that flows from friendship with Christ the Lord.

 But when he unpacks his thesis into what this Evangelical Catholicism looks like, Weigel tries to force a far more free Vatican II evangelical foot into a very narrow John Paul II shoe.  And when it comes to the place of Religious in a Vatican II Church, Weigel wants to return the nuns to veiled servitude and locked into the motherhouse at 5 pm for rosary, prayers, and a penitential supper of 2 day old bread, watery soup, and rancid cheese.  Nevertheless there has to be a via media between scrubbing the floors a la Audrey Hepburn in The Nuns Story and the somewhat vapid life of mascara and finding a Calvin Klein dress at the Goodwill that Sister Sara describes. 

I am not worried about whether nuns wear habits or whether monks catch a movie at the local ten-plex from time to time, but what I want of Religious is for them to blaze the trail for a more evangelical life for all of us.   I want people that can stop and make us question if we are on track towards the kingdom of God.  I see too many people around me, and around me at Mass, not concerned about whether or not their life style negatively impacts the lives of others.  When it comes to poverty I want to know how to have less so that other might have enough.  Can somebody show me how not to get caught up in the materialistic whirl that surrounds me with having to drive a gas-guzzling SUV or spending 200.00 on a pair of sunglasses?  Can someone show me how to love someone else without needing to control them?  Or show me how to love without becoming preoccupied that I am loved back? Or show me how to live life for simple pleasures and not constantly feed my id?  Can someone show me how to live for others, to empty myself in service for others as Christ emptied himself and took on the nature of a slave for me?  Can someone show me what the freedom is to live and do for the sake of pure love rather than to achieve or possess or control?  And above all, can someone show me how to “pray constantly” and live in that sort of relationship where all is God and God is all?  I think it is great that Sister Sara drives old ladies around and, from compassion for them, digs into her own near-empty purse to buy them a hamburger at McDonalds, but frankly, Sister, I expect even more of you.  Mother Theresa gave me more.  Saint Francis gave me more.  Most important, Jesus gave me more.  Show me how to receive what they have given us!  Don’t be good enough, be as good as you can be and show me how I can follow. 

Now as for that nut-case who whines Sorry to inform the readers, but these women aren't Catholic nuns…, honeychile, bless your black little withered heart, but when you give up your avocation as a Pharisee and are half as faithful to your vocation as a Christian as Sister Sara is to hers as a Sister of Saint Francis, I will take you seriously, but the criticism you level at her and her Sisters not only show your hypocrisy but your lack of basic Christian Doctrine and Catholic Church polity.  

Papal Transitions 2

The change in papal administrations has drawn out a journalistic increase in stories about clerical sex abuse—not that there are new charges of misbehavior but as the old stories, especially those of how charges were mishandled—are revived and rehashed.  The records of various Cardinals, Archbishops, and Bishops are examined and reexamined for everything from criminal malfeasance to simple incompetence.  And I think we have to expect this—not only because these are the stories that “sell” newspapers, but because the person-in-the-pews is not yet convinced that sufficient reforms are in place.  But what triggers my concern is several articles that have appeared recently with scathing critiques of Mother Theresa of Calcutta.  The journalists claim that given the amount of donations the saint received she could have given a much higher level of care to patients in her “houses for the dying.”
Mother Theresa didn’t have an American understanding of her mission.  She was more interested in surrounding her dying patients with love and support, alleviating their loneliness and fear, than she was in offering high-tech treatments that would have prolonged life but at the cost of removing the human care and treatment her nuns and volunteers offer.  The American approach to death has long been to see it as an adversary that must be fought no matter what the price—price both in fiduciary and humane terms.  Fortunately the hospice movement is starting to change our perception of death and we are coming to see it as the closing part of the process of life and, like Mother Theresa, understand that what is really needed is to provide people with an environment of spiritual, emotional, and humane security. 
The motives beneath the attack on Mother Theresa’s work is, like the other articles “exposing” the Church, that these are the stories that sell newspapers.  But there are more baleful reasons.  There are those who realize that shining a spotlight on the Church, and indeed on religion in general, could—were it not for their mudslinging—be an opportunity for others to give consideration to the positive roles that religion plays in society.  Not only Catholicism but organized religion is at an all-time low in its standing in western culture.  One of Benedict’s goals in becoming pope was to reverse that trend.  He had no success whatsoever in reaching this goal.  It will remain to his successor who will first have to shovel the church out from beneath the avalanche of offal that has not so much fallen upon it as has been drawn down upon the Church by its own prelates who just never “got it.”   This papal election is perhaps the most critical of the last five hundred years as the direction in which this pope sets the Church could be its call for revival or its death-knell. 

Reformation Today! 2



Model of the 2nd Temple--the temple in

the days of Jesus



I have been reading N.T. Wright’s Book Simply Jesus (Harper:2011).  I started it on my flight home from my retreat last week and have been reading it in bits and pieces over the past few days.  Almost done.  I find it a little disturbing as Wright comes out of the Evangelical wing of the Church of England and while he is an acknowledged scripture scholar, his methodologies leave him with some very different theological foundations than what my education has given me.  Ironically though, while we may begin from some different starting points—his what may be called neo-orthodoxy and mine, well, he would call them modernist simpliste probably but I would think of them as mainline Catholic (Rahnerian)—while we may begin from different premises I think we end up pretty much singing in the same choir.  Well, in the same choir, though perhaps he sings tenor to my baritone.  What I mean by that is I think the Church—in our case, the Catholic Church—needs a good shot of a sort of retro-viral evangelicalism to inoculate it against the disease of dominance-addiction that is becoming pandemic in religion today.  Ultra-orthodox Jewry wants to expel all non-Jews from Israel.  Right-wing Hindus attack churches and mosques on the Indian subcontinent.  Islamic extremism wants sharia law to be enforced over non-Muslim populations.  Religious crazies in our country want America to be declared a “Christian Nation.”  Atheists want religion relegated to the most private sectors of life and banned from view and hearing. And everybody wants their religious beliefs—or their rejection thereof—written into civil and criminal law regardless of the conscience rights of their neighbors to hold to different values and doctrines.

A point that Wright brings up several times in his book is that the Temple officials of Jesus’ day were heavy into power and the accumulation of personal wealth.  I was a bit surprised to read this—not that it is not completely true—but because modern fears of being labeled anti-Semite make it awkward to speak of the corruption in the Temple cult at the time of Jesus.  But corruption there was.  This isn’t anti-Semitic, or more properly, anti-Jewish, anymore than it is anti-Catholic to speak of the Borgia papacies or the pornocracy of the 10^th century.  Let’s just be honest.  Annas and Caiaphas and their buddies weren’t saints any more than Leo X or John XII were saints.  It’s history, no problemo. 

Yes, in the final decades of the Temple’s history, to hold the high-priesthood required one to work closely with the Roman authorities even at the cost of fidelity to Jewish principles and in return for this collaboration, the cozy arrangement of religion and power brought considerable financial compensation to those who held religious office. In fact, not only the High Priest but all those priests and levites involved in the Temple administration had access to power and the considerable revenues attached to the Temple.  The little guys from the countryside—like Zachariah, the Father of John the Baptist, came in for their two weeks a year of duty and did the routine tasks of the sacrifices and cult before returning to their villages, but the great leaders who composed the Sanhedrin or who were permanently attached to the Temple formed an elite club were men to be reckoned with.  There was a great chasm of wealth, social standing, and power between the “chief priests and leaders of the people” (Matt 26:3) and the average Jew.   The members of this small elite had no idea of the struggles and challenges of the lives of the mass of the people entrusted to their care—nor did they care.  The priesthood to them was simply a sinecure—a personal position that guaranteed them a comfortable life.  This was nothing new, Ezekiel in his day scored the priests for having been bad shepherds to the people (Ezekiel 34:1-10), abusing their position to exploit God’s faithful people.  

    I cannot but think that our Church might be very different if the Shepherds of the New Israel, the Church, had more experience of listening—listening—let me say it again—listening—to the people entrusted to their care.  I don’t think too many of the purpled mitered majesties have sat down with the father of four whose wife has anxiety attacks about becoming pregnant again and who  is wondering how he is going to put his kids through college.   I don’t know how many have sat down with the middle-aged woman whose husband has left her for an overbosomed twenty-something but who is afraid of falling in love again herself because the sacraments are too important to her.  I don’t know how many have sat down with gay couple who have had a stable and loving relationship for 25 years but are afraid that the local just-out-of-seminary jerk is going to deny them communion in front of the entire parish or refuse to baptize their adopted child.  I don’t know how many have talked with the couple who have unsuccessfully tried to become pregnant for eight years and won’t go in vitro out of fidelity to Church teaching.  You see we have all the answers—but do we really know the questions?  In speaking of prayer, Mother Theresa said:

Before you speak, it is necessary for you to listen, for God speaks in the silence of the heart.

But it is not only to God that we must listen—or rather, contemplative prayer is not the only place where we must listen to God.  We must have the lev shomea, the listening heart of Solomon and tune it to the experience of God’s people.  God speaks there too.  This is especially true of bishops and priests to whom has been entrusted the ministry of shepherding God’s people.  More important than their love for the rules and laws by which they teach and govern must be the love for those whom they have been called to lead.  The Law, after all, was made for us, not us for the Law.   

Two Churches--To Serve or to Be Served

The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve
Matthew 20:28

I am anxious to move on to the subject of the Gregorian Reform but should finish exploring the need for Reform in the contemporary Church beforehand.  While I love the past and can regale myself—if not others—for hours with historical details, I firmly believe that history is not about the past.  Those interested in the past qua past are not historians but antiquarians.   History, on the other hand, employs the past as a means of discussing and understanding the present and constructing the future.   In the August 1  posting I made a claim that the conflicts over the “correct” interpretation of the Second Vatican Council have left us with a bifurcated Church,  with one branch looking backwards to a world of power and pomp and another looking forward into a new world and a new role for the church in the world.  Avery Dulles wrote in his book The Catholicity of the Church, (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1985.  p. 136):  
... papal primacy in the first millennium was envisaged principally as witness, and was closely linked to what had been called the apostolicity of the Church.  In the second millennium, until Vatican Council II, papal authority was understood as a matter of power, and was linked to the Church’s attribute of unity.  A more recent kind of theology, reflected in the documents of Vatican II, links papal primacy rather with service, and interprets it in relation to the catholicity of the Church.    
      It is an interesting observation and if there is a flaw in Dulles’ analysis it is that applies this three-millennia-schema to papal authority when in fact it actually fits the wider self-understanding not simply of the papacy but of the Church itself.  It was not only the papacy, but the Church itself that understood its apostolic mission to be kergymatic, that is to witness to the Gospel to the ends of the earth. That understanding of mission shifted as the first millennium gave way to the second, the very time of the Gregorian Reform of which we are soon to speak, and not only the papacy but the Church itself saw that its “mark” of unity required to have a universal dominion, i.e. a power that extended over all peoples of all times.  The transition was not a smooth one as well shall see—in fact well into the second millennium there were still voices such as Peter Waldo and Francis of Assisi—who rejected the power model in favor of the witness model.  Nonetheless, the power model won out and the Church fitted its structures to accommodate it.  The papacy picked up the trappings of monarchy, the bishops forged alliances with the princes—indeed were often princes themselves.  The hierarchical nature of the Church became more evident as ecclesial power consolidated itself in the hands of prelates and indeed as the evangelical concept of authority gave way to the notion of “power” in ways that Jesus had explicitly condemned.  The liturgy too evolved in ways that emphasized power and hierarchy.  Ecclesial and social hierarchies mutually collaborated to reinforce each other’s dominance over the working and peasant classes and the Church became hopelessly (though at the time it was seen not as hopeless but as the ideal) entwined with the civil powers to create the ancien regime.  When that regime came tumbling down with the Bastille in 1789 (and the subsequent decade) the Church worked for its reestablishment, despising democracy, trumpeting absolutism and monarchy.  If you recall the various entries in this blog about “Americanism” you will remember that the Holy See really didn’t know how to deal with the unique situation of the American Church with its republican convictions in a world of monarchial Catholicism.   
     And so, according to Dulles, the time has come again to shift the paradigm—this time from power that guarantees the Church to be “one”   (though it never really did) to the catholicity of the Church marked by an upcoming millennium of service.  And here is where the conflict lies.  There are those who cannot let go of the “power” paradigm with its trappings of monarchy and lordly domination.  They love their Tridentine Mass which so clearly displays the hierarchy of persons in ecclesial society.  The Institute of Christ the King, Sovereign Priest based at Gricigliano in Tuscany epitomizes this ecclesiology of obsolescent fantasy and the ostentatious displays of Cardinals Burke, Pell, and Castrillón Hoyos as they travel the world in their ermine trimmed cappae magnae keep alive the hope of those who believe in a world of kings and peasants and hope to see once again throne and altar united and Catholicism supreme throughout the world.  
      There is, on the other hand,  those who recall and regard as prophetic the speech by Bishop Emil deSmedt  in the first session of Vatican II calling for an end to “triumphalism, juridicism, and clericalism”  There are those in the Church today who have a radical vision of a Church putting itself at the service of the poor.  Some, like Mother Teresa, embraced this new vision from a very conservative perspective.  Others, like Dorothy Day came at it from a very left field.  Some, like Archbishop Helder Camara or the American bishop, Bernard Topel just walked away from cumbersome pomp of their office and became witnesses to a truly apostolic Gospel.  Others, like the martyred Oscar Romero had been “party men” who found themselves surprisingly, even against their own expectations, converted to a radical Christianity.  Some were simply hard workers who pitched in and got things done like the four American churchwomen (Ita Ford, Maura Clarke, Dorothy Kazel, and Jean Donovan) martyred in El Salvador.  Some, like theologian Monika Hellwig,  left religious life in order to live the Gospel even more authentically than would have been possible as a religious.  Others—like Dulles himself—found that religious life and the institution of the Church gave them the better platform from which to make their contribution.   
       There are those who find this paradigm shift to be very difficult, indeed threatening, to accept and who do what they can to resist it.  Gamarelli’s stays in business supplying silver buckled shoes and purple stockings for those curial monsignori who are not about to give up the buttons and bows they’ve dreamed of since their seminary days.  Those members of the Roman Curia who are members of or have influence with the Congregation for Bishops try to insure that men named to the episcopacy today are not too inclined to the service model foretold by Dulles.  Certainly in the United States most bishops are quite friendly to be with and usually without much pretense,  but at the same time are corporation men through and through who will not effect any drastic social reformation within the Church or regarding the Church’s position in society.  But the wheels of history, while they do turn slowly, turn nonetheless and eventually one will come to the Chair of Peter who knows that humble service speaks the gospel more convincingly to our contemporary world than do the circumstances of pomp.  Dulles, I have no doubt, is right—service will mark the Church of the third millennium but we are only in the second decade of that epoch and there is much time to come.  The autocracy and the silk gowns alike will one day appear as ridiculous anachronisms  and the battles over models of the Church will be a historical footnote—at least until the paradigm must shift again. 

More on the Church's Need for a New Reformation

A Buddhist monk and a Catholic

Religious Sister stand together in

St. Peter's Square during the

Beatification of Mother Teresa

Another indication of an urgent need for Reform in the Church is the critical hemorrhaging of members.  The rapidly changing demographics as vast numbers of Americans move from the North East and Midwest to the South and South West as well as the huge influx of Catholic Immigrants from Latin America and the Pacific Rim has created a sort of shell-game that give the impression in some parts of the country that Church population is somewhat stable.  And indeed, because of the immigration the numbers are holding, unlike for Mainline Protestant Churches.  Even in the North East and Midwest, there is room for self-deception as complacent officials attribute the empty churches to the suburbanization of the Catholic Population and the decrease in family size from the post-war years where Catholic parents often had six or more children.  And, again, there is some truth to this.  But I am a great reader of death notices and when I find a McLaughlin or a Catanzarro or a Kowalski being buried from “Pine Ridge Bible Church” or having their “Celebration of Life” at McGinty’s Tavern and Bowling Alley –and I am finding a lot of these obituaries today—I realize that something has changed.   Several weeks back I did a series of entries on why people come (or don’t come) to Mass.  When people meet a priest at a social event they no longer feel any embarrassment or discomfiture at the subject of no longer being Catholic.  When I was growing up, admittedly in the Pre-Vatican II years, you heard “once a Catholic, always a Catholic.”  And that was true. It was impossible to ever truly leave the Church.  O you might go somewhere else, especially if there was a divorce and remarriage issue, but you always trailed your Catholicism with you.  No longer.  I once marveled at how Protestants could be Congregationalists until they moved to a town where the Methodists church was closer and they became Methodists.  “Abide with Me” lent itself to playing musical chairs much better than “Panis Angelicus,” but no longer.  Today you find Catholics sliding comfortably into a wide variety of other churches, other religions, and no religion at all. 
    Several years ago I met a fellow on a retreat.  He had been in his younger years, long ago, a member of the Society of Jesus—a Jesuit—though he left before ordination, married, and raised a family.  He and his wife are devout and faithful Catholics.  During the Cold War he served as United States Ambassador to one of the Soviet Satellite States of Eastern Europe where his wife and he were driven each Sunday  in the Ambassador’s car, flags flying, to Mass at the Cathedral in public witness of his personal faith and the American commitment to Freedom of Religion.  He regularly called on the capital’s Archbishop or sent the Archbishop gifts of food, firewood, and other necessities the regime made it difficult for the prelate to obtain as a sign to the government that nothing untoward should happen to the Archbishop or it would be noticed by the American Embassy.  The evening I was a guest at their home, we were joined by their daughter, a Buddhist nun.  This woman, raised a Catholic in the most devout of homes, is no flake.  To the contrary.  Not only is she a known and reputable Buddhist Scholar, but a practicing and well respected physician who, among other clients, is the physician for Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity in her city.  I have since arranged for her to speak on a number of panels with Catholic, Jewish, and Islamic scholars on the subjects of spirituality and peacemaking.   I have never discussed with her the subject of why she found her spiritual home in Buddhism, but I am reminded of Richard Rohr’s quote: Much of the Western world has given up on the Church and is going other places for wisdom.  Unfortunately, in these other places they are sometimes “willingly filling their belly with the husks the pigs are eating” (Luke 15:16) But we in the church must ask ourselves if we have not been the parent who sent them away because there was nothing trustworthy or life-giving at home.  (Richard Rohr, Near Occasions of Grace, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993, p. 26)  By no means do I want to compare Buddhism to empty husks--to the contrary--I am well read in Buddhism and appreciate its great wisdom and depth, for the most part quite compatible with our Christian faith and practice.  But the lack of appreciation among Catholics for our own profound mystical tradition and practice has left a hunger for many that drives them to look elsewhere for what is at home in locked cupboards.       I deeply appreciate Pope Benedict’s call to a New Evangelism, but it is in vain until we, as a Church, have a deep and soul-searching inner Reformation, individually and collectively.  After all, how can those who have not yet believed the Gospel be its heralds?